1Lean Fall Stand (2021), Jon McGregor’s fifth novel, questions borders in a physical, generic and, most importantly, linguistic sense, which leads it to question the limits of representation itself. The story begins in a borderless place, Antarctica. This unclaimed continent, entirely devoted to international scientific cooperation, is the setting of the novel’s first section, ‘Lean’. ‘Doc’/Robert is a Technical Assistant in charge of an expedition composed of two postdoctoral students, Thomas and Luke, who are engaged in the difficult task of mapping this seemingly uniform landscape, constantly shifting under the extreme climate conditions.
2The first page opens on a crisis: the three men are caught in a storm that has taken them by surprise at a moment when they were standing apart from one another. The internal focalisation shifts and navigates from one man to the other in order to highlight their inability to establish a line of communication with the others. This failure to maintain contact takes a tragic turn as we understand that something is wrong with ‘Doc’, whose thoughts are becoming more and more confused and incoherent.
3In the second part of the novel, ‘Fall’, we discover that ‘Doc’/Robert suffered a stroke, resulting in his inability to react properly to the situation, and ultimately causing Thomas’s death of hypothermia. This section presents a radical change in terms of tone and style: the story breaks away from the generic boundaries of the polar adventure (Lewis-Jones 9 and Leane 259) to become an intimate narrative about disability and care. Robert’s stroke resulted in physical paralysis and aphasia, the issue of communication becoming even more central. After an ellipsis marking the end of the expedition and the repatriation of its surviving members, we thus witness, through the perspective of Robert’s wife turned carer, Anna, his long, painful and never fully achieved recovery process, as well as their attempts to create a new language of their own.
4Finally, the third part of the novel, ‘Stand’, is centred on the group meetings that Robert and other people suffering from aphasia attend, trying, with the help of Amira, to create a new form of communication. Through collaboration and by engaging their whole body in the effort to express themselves, the aphasic patients, including Robert, eventually manage to tell their traumas and reclaim their own stories.
5This article will argue that Lean Fall Stand presents a progressive ‘unbounding’ of language, the shattering of its borders precisely because aphasia has made it too restrictive. I shall analyse the novel’s ‘evolution from solipsistic to joint and on to collective attention’ (Ganteau 142) in order to show how relationality is first problematised, then reconfigured through metonymy. First, I will focus on the narrative’s staging of a failure of representational metonymy, stressing the characters’ imprisonment in their own subjectivities and perceptions. In a second part, I will analyse how this failure of communication contaminates the very fabric of language, namely through aphasia, which results from a disorder of the metonymic function of language. Finally, I will show how metonymy is eventually used to subvert the very boundaries it had put in place, displacing language to the field of physical and collective expression, grounded in relationality.
6The first section of Lean Fall Stand presents a fragmented picture of the events that are unfolding: the storm in which the characters are caught highly restricts their perceptions and they have no knowledge of each other’s whereabouts or actions. Therefore, the readers are left to their own devices to try and piece together the contiguous fragments provided by the three centres of focalisation, both in space and time.
7The metaphor of the ‘full picture’ is particularly relevant as McGregor’s destabilisation of the readers’ perceptions corresponds to the characters’ own inability to represent and map accurately the Antarctic landscape. Ironically, the three men’s attempts to reach a faithful picture of their surroundings leads them to move away from one another, producing the fragmented representation of the events that follow when the storm hits and, ultimately, causes their tragic outcome:
[Thomas] had set up his camera tripod at the edge of the ice, trying to get a shot that foregrounded the still waters of the Sound with the cliffs of Priestley Head in the near distance. Luke had stayed with the skidoo and the rest of the kit. Ten, maybe fifteen metres to his left. Maybe more. Doc had gone off on the other skidoo and climbed up Priestley Head, to give the picture perspective. Without someone in the frame there was no way to capture the scale of this place. He’d been struggling with it since they’d first arrived. In the pictures he’d taken so far, everything looked too small. The distant mountains. The ridges on either side of the valley. The glacier. The icebergs creaking against each other, with the light turning bluely inside them. It was difficult to fit it all in. (2)
8As this passage highlights, the first issue faced by Thomas when attempting to capture an image of Antarctica is one of perspective: the hugeness of the landscape seems to abolish visual hierarchies. The figure of Doc constitutes the only familiar point of reference to an external spectator, as if the wildness and inhospitality of that continent made it resistant even to the human eye’s attempts to grasp it.
9Even before the storm begins, then, the character’s sense of space is put in jeopardy by the immensity of his surroundings—a paradox for a researcher in ‘Geographic Information Services’ (22–23). This appears clearly in the epanorthosis highlighting Thomas’s heuristic effort to evaluate the distance between himself and Luke: ‘Ten, maybe fifteen metres to his left. Maybe more’. In this passage, the storm has already hit and Thomas is attempting to recall the events that led to his current situation. Thus, though apparently insignificant, the evaluation of the distance separating him from his teammates is, we know, essential as it will condition the young man’s ability to orient himself in the middle of the storm. As a result, the repetition of ‘maybe’ not only stresses the character’s difficulties in trying to evaluate an immeasurable landscape but also conveys his sense of panic at the belated realisation that, even as he was attempting to ‘capture’ his surroundings, he had already lost his bearings—now made irrecoverable by the storm.
10The description of the pictures themselves highlights Thomas’s disturbed ability to have a clear grasp of distances and scales. As he says, ‘everything look[s] too small’ (2), suggesting that the pictures fail to do justice to the monumental elements of the landscape. Yet, the final sentence, ‘It was difficult to fit it all in’ (2), insists on these gigantic dimensions that exceed the frame of the picture, shedding doubt on the ability of photography to ‘contain’ such a landscape. Thus, the Antarctic landscape appears excessive and paradoxical: too immense to be photographed, it can only be represented through a betrayal of the very proportions that make it unique, making it ‘too small’ and ‘too big’ at the same time.
11The issue of perspective at the heart of Thomas’s representational conundrum also appears in the paratactic enumeration of the geophysical components of the landscape: ‘The distant mountains. The ridges on either side of the valley. The glacier. The icebergs . . .’ (2). Indeed, all the elements are juxtaposed, contiguous with one another, but fail to come together to compose an actual ‘scenery’. Without perspective, visual hierarchies are ineffectual: these elements cannot be perceived in relation to one another, and visual dialogue becomes impossible.
12This apprehension of the landscape can be considered as metonymic insofar as it illustrates some principles of metonymic representation but only to highlight their failure the better. Zoltán Kövecses explains that ‘metonymy is a relationship based on contiguity’ (175) and that its main function ‘seems to be to provide mental, cognitive access to a target entity that is less readily or easily available; typically, a more concrete or salient vehicle entity is used to give or gain access to a more abstract or less salient target entity within the same domain’ (176; emphasis added). In a similar vein, Lodge describes metonymic discourse as follows:
Since we cannot describe everything in a given context, we select certain items at the expense of not selecting others: this is true of all discourse. But in discourse with no ‘poetic’ coloration at all, (Jakobson’s ‘pragmatic prose’) the selection of items is based on purely logical principles: what is present implies what is absent, the whole stands for the part, the thing for its attributes, unless the part or attribute is itself vital to the message. . . . (94; emphasis added)
13Looking at Thomas’s enumeration of the components of the landscape, we can see that each of them, taken individually, could perfectly stand for one’s idea of a typical Antarctic scenery but he finds himself unable to select one single point on which to focus all his attention—which mirrors the narrative organisation of this section of the novel, where the focalisation constantly shifts between the three characters without managing to provide the readers with a unified perspective resulting from the logical combination of each viewpoint. All the elements, ‘mountains’, ‘ridges’, ‘glacier’, ‘iceberg’, are contiguous with one another but they resist both ‘logical’ and ‘poetic’ principles as Thomas finds himself unable to put any single one of them forward. None of them is ‘salient’—or all of them equally are—, as if the exceptional proportions of the landscape, and the awe it inspires, made it irreducible to metonymic representation—and, for that matter, simply irrepresentable.
14In the course of that first section, the impossibility to select a salient or relevant piece of information, caused by the very nature of the Antarctic settings, is compounded by the fact that the characters’ perceptions become completely hindered by the extreme weather in which they are caught. This is especially visible through their attempts to use radio communication and, as with Thomas’s pictures, they fail to identify one single point on which to focus their attention. Through the use of internal focalisation, the readers are placed in the same position as the characters as they are only granted full access to one side of the dialogue at a time, as can be seen in the following excerpts, where Thomas and Luke are trying to have an exchange. In the second chapter, the focalisation is centred on Luke:
‘Thomas, Thomas, come in? Doc, come in? This is Luke, this is Luke. Over.’
‘. . . is Thomas, this is Thomas. Over.’
‘Nice one, Thomas, thank fuck. You were starting to worry me, where the fuck are you? I can’t see you. I can’t see anything.’
‘Yes, Luke … issue, over.’
‘Missing word before issue, can you repeat, over?’
‘. . . find the radio. That problem’s over, over.’
‘Yeah, okay, okay. Have you heard from Doc? Over.’
‘Negative, over.’
‘Maybe we should get over to the Head and find him, what do you think? Over.’
‘. . . broken, can you repeat, over?’
‘Can you hear me now? Should we go and find Doc? Where are you?’
‘. . . this . . . again . . . out.’ (13)
15After a third chapter focusing on ‘Doc’, seemingly oblivious to the exchanges on his radio, chapter four presents the same dialogue, but from the perspective of Thomas:
‘Nice one, Thomas, thank fuck. You were starting to worry me, where the fuck are you? I can’t see you. I can’t see anything.’
‘Yes, Luke. Having a temporary navigational issue, over.’
‘. . . issue, can you repeat, over?’
‘I couldn’t find the radio. That problem’s over, over.’
‘Yeah, okay, okay. Have you heard from Doc? Over.’
‘Negative, over.’
‘Maybe . . . should . . . Head . . .’
‘Your transmission is broken, can you repeat, over?’
‘. . . hear me now? . . . find Doc . . .’
‘Luke, I’m not getting this. I’ll try again in a bit. Over and out.’ (18)
16McGregor’s re-enactment of the same scene from different points of view emphasises the sense of destabilisation of this passage by adding temporal uncertainty to the characters’ spatial and sensorial loss of bearings. The disruptions of the narrative timeline thus recreate, on the level of the reading experience, the disorientation caused by the unexpected arrival of a storm in a setting that was already unreliable. Furthermore, by delaying our access to the full extent of the dialogue, the narrative not only mirrors the characters’ entrapment in their own incomplete perceptions, but it also recreates, for the benefit of the readers, the belatedness that characterises the experience of trauma. The suddenness of the traumatic experience is indeed precisely what prevents the mind from fully processing it and Freud (1920) explains that ‘memory-traces . . . are often most powerful and most enduring when the process which left them behind was one which never entered consciousness’ (19). The persistence of trauma thus comes from its very inaccessibility to consciousness, a delayed realisation that Cathy Caruth (1996) termed the ‘inherent latency within the [traumatic] experience itself’ (17). In this passage, the situation, though already worrying when seen through Luke’s eyes, becomes dire when it is presented again from Thomas’s perspective, especially after a lapse that has made us realise that Doc’s radio might be malfunctioning.
17Contrary to what happens in a traumatised psyche, when the second scene of dialogue occurs, the ‘traces’ of the first one are still present in the readers’ memory, but only to make us aware of how incomplete a picture each character has of what the other said. Thus, though we do have access to the full extent of the discussion, the narrative draws our attention to all that is missing from each passage, working as a kind of anti-metonymy where what is salient is not speech but silence. If we take a closer look at the content of the characters’ exchange, we can indeed notice that it is precisely the most relevant words that are missing from their broken speech. This is particularly striking in the last four lines of the dialogue where Luke and Thomas’s attempts to define a course of action are reduced to a few scattered words emptied of their informational content. Only the grammatical structure of the sentence remains, with adverbs, prepositions and modals, while the referents have disappeared, so that no metonymic inferences can be made to recover its initial meaning. As a result, language between the two characters is effectively reduced to its phatic function, allowing them only to maintain contact while foreclosing any attempt to exchange information. When the line of communication is eventually closed down, what remains is the sense of a missed exchange, a failure of the characters to bridge the gap that separates them and that will, literally, grow wider.
18We can thus take the idea of the anti-metonymy even further if we consider Lodge’s definition of metonymic writing in The Modes of Modern Writing as a characteristic of realistic narration:
The metonymic text seems to offer itself to our regard not as a metaphor but as a synecdoche, not as a model of reality, but as a representative bit of reality. [T]hese authors [of metonymic texts] seem to be saying—the phrase ‘is like’ denoting, here, a relationship of contiguity rather than similarity. (109)
19In the first section of Lean Fall Stand, McGregor uses shifts in internal focalisation to juxtapose ‘slices of reality’ from one chapter to the next. Though such a narrative strategy is not particularly innovative in itself, what becomes striking is that the vignettes presented to us through each focal point express a reality so tenuous that it becomes solipsistic. This section—and the whole novel for that matter—thus eschews the temptation to subject these multiple fragments to the idea of an allegedly ‘objective’ reality that would exist independently from the characters’ perceptions. If anything, what the contiguity of focalisations does is highlight the singularity of each character’s experience and the impossibility for their juxtaposition to amount to anything akin to a unified perspective. In other words, not only is each character’s perspective so limited that it cannot be metonymically ‘representative’ of a larger ‘reality’, but the sum of each part of the narrative also fails to amount to a single, stable whole. This process of fragmentation eventually culminates in the characters’ realisation of the incommunicability of their experiences.
20By the time they manage to re-establish contact, it is too late as the ice floe on which Thomas was standing has started drifting away. Thus, Luke’s inability to understand his friend’s words no longer comes from the poor quality of the radio transmission but expresses the traumatic shock of this realisation:
‘Luke, you saw? You saw? I’m moving. I’m on an ice floe, I’m fucking adrift.’
‘Say again? Adrift? Over.’
‘Repeat. I am on an ice floe, drifting across Lopez Sound. You fucking read me? Over.’
‘Thomas, what? What? Confirm? You can’t be drifting. It must be a tide crack. Work around it? Find your way, I mean. Thomas?’
‘Luke, I’ve got the GPS running. I’m drifting. For real.’ (25–26)
21Contrary to the previous passage, the relevant word, ‘Adrift’—as well as the rest of Thomas’s speech—, has indeed been heard. Yet, the repetition of that same word, along with the series of questions stressing his disbelief, expresses the impossibility for Luke to admit what is happening. As indicated by Thomas, he did see what was happening as, only a few lines above, he observed: ‘Thomas was fifty or sixty metres away. . . . There was clear grey water between them’ (25). However, in spite of the obvious, Luke ‘didn’t understand what he was looking at’ (25), as expressed by his repeated questions to Thomas. Here, the traumatic ‘shock of sight’ (Caruth 39) emphasises the solipsistic dimension of the characters’ experiences: Luke’s grasp on reality is no longer even subjected to his sensorial perceptions as his mind’s inability to accept what he has seen imprisons him within a traumatic denial.
22The exchange between the two friends, then, highlights a failure of the referential function of language, the occurrence of trauma making the metonymic link between the characters’ internal focalisations and ‘reality’ even more precarious than it was. As we shall see, the second part of the novel pushes that logic one step further by making language itself frail and uncontrollable, using metonymy to push it to the very limits of referentiality and signification through Robert’s experience of aphasia.
23The second section, ‘Fall’, deals with the aftermath of the crisis, and is told from the perspective of Robert’s wife, Anna. As the narrative progresses, she must take stock of the long-term repercussions of Robert’s stroke on her life and, when he comes back home, must accept her role as a carer, fully implied in her husband’s recovery process, and come to terms with the irreversibility of that situation. Thus, Lean Fall Stand is not so much concerned with the more spectacular aspects of Robert’s stroke or with how such a condition can be overcome but, on the contrary, it focuses on the minutiae of the characters’ confrontation with disability and ‘is essentially concerned with the everyday work of the impaired protagonist, who starts rehabilitation, and that of the improvised carer, who is confronted with the difficulties of multi-tasking’ (Ganteau 141). Indeed, as David T. Mitchell and Sharon L. Snyder explain,
Postmodern narrative does not seek to fully repair or resolve a character’s impairment, but rather delves into the social, personal, political, and psychological implications of impairment as bequeathing a social awareness. This yields a literature teeming with disability as a matter of identity, perspective and subjectivity. (165)
24If that whole section of the novel ‘draws attention to the often invisible role of those on whom the (everyday) lives of the disabled depend’ (Ganteau 140) through an exploration of Anna’s subjectivity, the last three chapters are especially striking in the way they highlight the radicality of the changes brought about to her life by Robert’s disability. This is achieved through repetition and metonymy as almost each paragraph in these chapters begins with the words ‘she had to’, taking the form of an enumeration of a helper’s incessant cycle of tasks. The beginning of chapter seven initiates this process as it describes a day in Anna and Robert’s life:
She had to change the bedsheets in the morning because he’d made a mess of using the pan. She had to help him roll out of the bed and lever himself into the chair. She had to put a towel on the armchair because his pyjamas were still wet. (150)
25And the anaphora keeps going:
She had to answer the door while Robert was in the toilet. Whoever it was had already knocked twice. . . .
She had to return a call from the speech and language service, and confirm the first home visit. . . .
She had to find him things to do, constantly. (151–156)
- 1 This dual aspect of care as both moral value and empirical practice is emphasised by Virginia Held (...)
26The repetition mirrors the constant solicitations and the mental load that weigh on Anna, conveying the sense of inescapability that accompanies her new status as a carer. Furthermore, the paratactic style of these sentences expresses the character’s compartmentalisation of each action she has to carry out. The successive tasks thus appear as independent from one another and, like the components of the Antarctic landscape, their relation is one of contiguity. This allows the narrative to stress the effort required of Anna to accomplish each of them: each ‘had to’ encompasses both the pragmatic necessities and the moral imperative of the work of care,1 and becoming a metonymy of the helper’s endlessly demanding work.
27From another perspective, we may wonder at the temporal status of the actions that are enumerated in these paragraphs. Temporal boundaries are indeed blurred as the readers struggle to ascertain if Anna’s actions are punctual or if they belong to her everyday routine of caring for Robert. In the excerpts quoted above, the first lines seem to belong to a pattern of habits that the character has started to develop: changing the bedsheets, making sure that Robert does not get cold, etc. This would give the anaphoric ‘had to’ a metonymic value, as each action would stand for its other, repeated occurrences over an indeterminate period of time. However, other sentences seem to refer to one day in particular, placing us in the narrative of one day in the characters’ lives. The following actions—answering the door, returning a specific call—also refer to punctual events, while the term ‘constantly’ in the last sentence implies, for its part, a recurring situation.
28This temporal indeterminacy between one-time and repeated actions might be seen as a means to widen the metonymic dimension of Anna’s newly acquired habits of care: every single action—even punctual ones—carries the weight of all the others, representing the trauma of a radically altered life. As a result, Anna’s time does not evolve, she is caught within a traumatic ‘time that does not pass’ (Davoine and Gaudillière 163), the loss of bearings conveyed by this passage reminding the readers of the characters’ disorientation in the first section of the novel. Thus, once more, McGregor’s use of metonymy serves to stress the subjectivity of his characters’ perceptions, illustrating the fragmentation of experience caused by trauma as well as the sense of discontinuity, of a precarious relationality, that can be a corollary of disability.
29The tenuous relationality between Robert and Anna results essentially from Robert’s aphasia which forecloses access to his interiority. Indeed, while the first section of the novel raised the question of the incommunicability of the characters’ specific perceptions, that issue becomes absolutely central here as Robert’s loss of language is compounded by his disappearance as a centre of focalisation. The readers are thus left to share Anna’s guesses and interpretations of his half-words and gestures, hindered by paralysis.
30In ‘Two Aspects of Language and Two Types of Aphasic Disturbances’, Jakobson famously identified two forms of aphasia which he related to two functions of language, namely the metonymic and the metaphoric functions. This allowed him to describe two organising principles of language: contiguity and similarity. According to this description, it seems that Robert’s aphasia is characterised by a ‘continuity disorder’, that is, a dysfunction of the metonymic aspect of language—interestingly echoing the loss of relationality presented in the novel. To quote Jakobson:
- 2 More recent research on the topic of aphasia describes this phenomenon in similar terms: ‘Persons w (...)
The syntactical rules organizing words into higher units are lost; this loss (called agrammatism) causes the degeneration of the sentence into a mere ‘word heap,’ to use Jackson’s image. Word order becomes chaotic; the ties of grammatical coordination and subordination, whether concord or government, are dissolved. As might be expected, words endowed with purely grammatical functions, like conjunctions, prepositions, pronouns, and articles, disappear first, giving rise to the so-called ‘telegraphic style.’ . . . (Jakobson 106; original emphasis)2
31In the same way as it was impossible for the readers, in the first section of the novel, to reassemble the different vignettes of each character’s focalisation into a coherent whole, the structure of the sentence is precisely what fails Robert here. The enunciation of a sequence of syllables has become extremely arduous, let alone the construction of sentences, and the other characters must try and make out the meaning behind Robert’s half-formed sounds, as can be seen in the following exchange involving one of his former colleagues:
‘My my my. My car.’
‘Michael.’ . . .
‘Wok, wok,’ he said. ‘Me, wok, mmm.’
He was looking for a word. He moved his hand over a series of small hurdles. Michael watched him carefully.
‘Next, soon. In a little while?’
‘Yes, yes.’
‘You’ll be back at work soon, Doc? Is that what you mean?’
‘Yes, obviously. Soon.’ (124–125)
32Here, the relation of contiguity between the words serves as a basis for the interpretation of the propositional meaning of Robert’s sentence: ‘Me, wok’, along with the gesture becomes ‘[I]’ll be back at work soon’. As Jakobson observes, this kind of aphasia ‘tends to give rise to infantile one-sentence utterances and one-word sentences’ (107). On the level of a single word, inferences based on contiguity must also be used as the sounds uttered by Robert are those, available to him, that come closest to what he actually means. Thus, ‘-chael’ (or /kəl/) in ‘Michael’ becomes ‘car’ (/kɑː/) and his interlocutors must operate the substitution for themselves.
33However, Robert’s inability to use connectors does not appear merely in his own speech but also hinders his understanding of others. This becomes particularly problematic when he must answer questions regarding the events that led to Thomas’s death and struggles to make out the logical connections behind his interlocutors’ words and ideas:
‘Doc, can you show us where the skidoo accident took place?’
Robert looked at each of them, and at the map. Liz found a picture of a skidoo on her phone, and moved her hand across the map.
‘Skidoo. Crash?’ She clapped her hands together when she said crash.
Robert nodded. ‘Crash? Where? Here?’
He circled his hand somewhere around the foot of Priestley Head. (155, original emphasis)
34The sentence only makes sense to him when it is reduced to its core elements, that is, when only the words ‘skidoo’ and ‘crash’ remain, respectively associated with a picture and a gesture. The metonymic cognitive process through which meaning is retrieved by Robert is described by aphasia specialists Cherney and Carpenter:
When we attempt to retrieve a word, the features for the target concept are activated as well as features for many associated concepts. The concept that receives the greatest amount of activation (i.e., many features are activated or a distinguishing feature is activated) is selected. . . . Individuals with aphasia may activate an associated concept in place of the target concept, resulting in the production of a semantically related but incorrect word. (201)
35However, even if the gap in communication is temporarily bridged by Liz’s intervention, who manages to use an ‘associated concept’ through which he can grasp the ‘target concept’, the questions addressed to Robert ultimately fail to reach—through metonymic inferences—a full picture of what happened exactly. The meeting with his former colleagues concludes with Robert’s inability to answer their questions:
‘Doc, did you see either Luke or Thomas after that?’
He waved the hand: no, no I can’t. He looked up at the ceiling. He looked at Anna. Anna asked if they could come back the next day. (156)
36The restrictive borders of Robert’s aphasia, along with those put on his psyche by the double trauma of the stroke and of Thomas’s death, prevent him from going further in his retelling of what happened in Antarctica. In the metonymic process of reconstruction that takes place here, the ‘missing’ parts of the narrative seem too important to produce a comprehensive picture of the events. However, throughout the second and third sections of the novel, Robert will find ways to overcome the limitations of his speech in order to express his own, subjective truth.
37As a corollary to her role as a carer, Anna is in charge of re-constructing the missing links in Robert’s speech and, as in the first section, we see the characters attempt to establish a line of communication that requires all their attention. The result, this time, is more successful and Anna becomes responsible for the metonymic reconstruction of the elements that are absent from Robert’s speech. She progressively becomes capable of inferring Robert’s meaning but she also recreates, through metonymy, the missing parts of his speech, as evidenced in this excerpt, where he is trying to comment on the weather:
The blossom was out. The freshness of it took her by surprise, again. The bright whites and yellows and pinks. The energy of it. He made a big show of smelling the air, making snorting noises and puffing out his cheeks.
‘Sing, sing sing. Fuck. Christ. Sing.’
‘You’re going to sing for us now?’
He waved a hand in front of his face. No. No. He waved a hand at the garden. Something about this.
‘Try again.’
‘Sing. Win ter. Sing.’
‘Spring?’
‘Yes! Obviously. Yes. Sing! Fuck.’
‘Spring. Yes it is. It’s definitely spring.’ (164)
38This passage illustrates Anna’s hermeneutic process, trying to select the most salient elements to understand Robert. The metonymic inferences she makes are complex, setting the basis for a reconfigured relationality relying on joint attention, as highlighted by Ganteau: ‘. . . both characters find themselves ensconced in a learning situation which channels their attentional capacities and energies’ (141). To obtain the word ‘Spring’, Anna thus solicits her observation of her husband’s gestures (puffing out his cheeks) and utterances (‘Sing’), her own logic (the antonym ‘Winter’) and her attention to the context (the garden). These inferences are metonymic insofar as they rely on relations of contiguity, from the deixis used by Robert to point at their surroundings to the use of another word belonging to the same conceptual category as the one he means (‘Winter’). Anna then proceeds by elimination: not singing, something about the garden. Strikingly, Robert’s gestures have become metonymies for his missing speech, which Anna seems to reconstruct in her mind, through free indirect speech—‘No. No’, ‘Something about this’—, as if she were giving him back his lost voice. Eventually, not only does she reinsert the missing phonemes in ‘spring’ but she also reconstructs the whole sentence intended by Robert and makes it part of a dialogue, when she confirms ‘It’s definitely spring’.
39Beyond the couple’s newfound ability to communicate, this passage is particularly interesting because it invites us to reflect on Robert’s own attention to Anna. Indeed, the internal focalisation, centred on Anna, only allows us to reconstruct Robert’s perspective implicitly, metonymically. His comment on the fact that it is spring seems to be a direct response to Anna’s own perceptions, mentioned at the beginning of the excerpt. Though her physical reactions are not described, they may not have escaped Robert’s attention, so that his implicit comment, ‘it is spring’, might itself be seen as a metonymic deduction of Anna’s behaviour. Spring is indeed the whole that encompasses the array of sensations she experiences. By wording this, Robert participates in the construction of a new form of relationality and, by making the readers pay attention to his missing perspective and reconstruct it metonymically, the narrative also includes them into a practice of joint attention (Ganteau 145).
40In the third section of the novel, we discover other types of aphasia through the members of the group that Robert and Anna attend, so that the intimate boundaries of their private struggle open up onto other experiences and manifestations of the same condition. For instance, we discover Peter’s or Mary’s fluent aphasia where words flow unhindered but do not seem to make any logical sense, or Sean’s embarrassing and constant swearing.
41In this context, interpretation is even more complex and the young woman in charge of the group, Amira, has to coordinate a variety of discourses that, although they are contiguous with each other, do not seem to make any sense. In the following example, they try to guess what was Mary’s former occupation:
‘What other actions do people do, when they’re working with horses? Anyone?’
‘Yes, okay, like this, see. Shit, shit, like this, see?’ Sean was making a two-handed digging gesture. Raymond pointed at him in agreement.
‘Right, like mucking out the stables do you mean, Sean?’
‘Yes, okay, mucking. Mucking. Like this, see? Mary?’
‘Oh yes, that’s right! Very good.’
Mary gave Raymond and Sean both a look, and shook her head.
‘My simple certain then became,’ she said, sharply. (220–221)
42Language, here, presents itself as an uncharted and unreliable territory. The contiguity of the characters’ various speech impairments within the same dialogue results in a nonsensical, almost musical exchange that Amira tries nonetheless to conduct towards the production of meaning. The characters’ tone and gestures are what conveys meaning while their words cannot be trusted: Sean’s swearing or Mary’s cryptic sentences have nothing to do with their actions while Raymond’s approval is not actually expressed by his words—which he repeats constantly—but by his gesture of ‘agreement’. In spite of the apparently nonsensical cacophony that they produce, the characters eventually manage to reach the truth—Mary used to train racehorses: they make metonymic inferences, based on what she manages to ‘tell’ them (‘working with horses’), later by showing them a picture of a jockey. Each piece of information, through relations of contiguity, metonymically leads the others to the truth in a practice of ‘collective attention’ (Ganteau 142), making each of their utterances and gestures a part of the full meaning they eventually attain.
43Metonymic inferences, however, can lead to misinterpretation, especially when there can be no deixis, that is, when the characters refer to something whose existence is intangible. This is the case with the image of the red plane that Robert keeps referring to throughout the novel. Its mention is triggered by the picture of a blue plane, showed to him by a speech therapist:
‘Plane, Robert, yes. That’s excellent; plane. But do you see the aeroplane in this picture is blue? Blue aeroplane. The car is red, here. Red car. Blue aeroplane. See?’
Robert pressed his hands against his thighs and straightened up, puffing his cheeks out in exasperation. ‘Yes yes yes. Blue paylane yes. Christ. Obviously. Ha! Me, me, me. Eyes. Eyes. Eyes red paylane here, here. Phew! Christ! Red paylane bigger bigger here, phew!’
‘Red car, Robert; blue plane. See?’
‘Fucking fuck fuck yes! Yes! Fuck.’ (132)
44The image of the red plane is in fact a traumatic reminiscence associated with Thomas’s death that haunts Robert, as that plane is the one that came to his and Luke’s rescue. He is, however, unable to communicate this and the metonymic relation that he establishes—a contiguity between the blue plane on the picture and the plane in his memory—is not understood by his interlocutor who, expecting a relation between signifier and signified, believes that Robert mistakenly associates the colour of one item with the wrong object.
45Yet, Robert’s traumatic memories eventually find a way to express themselves, precisely through communication with and for the group, when he reenacts the events that led to Thomas’s death on stage. Here, he manages, for the first time, to recount his own version of the events, through a fragmented assemblage of half-words, gestures and pictures, but, more importantly, through a collective form of expression. The others help him, prompt him, support him, holding a map out for him when the ‘impossible word’, Antarctica, fails to come out of his mouth (265). Therefore, his own, private story has become a collective one, appropriated by the rest of the group that has become essential to its retelling: ‘They were trying not to talk out loud. But they wanted him to know they were there. Carry on, Robert. You can. You can do it’ (265). Hanging on to his words, they are now one voice, inscribing themselves in a reconfigured relationality where each of them is an equally essential part of the whole that their collective experience has become.
46In the first section, the metonymic ‘slices’ of experience that were juxtaposed expressed the characters’ solipsistic inability to reach out to each other and their broken speech made them completely unable to find a common language. On the contrary, in the last part, aphasia seems to paradoxically grant the characters the ability to expand the borders of language. Communication, therefore, no longer takes the straightforward form of a linear sentence but becomes multifaceted: the characters engage their whole body in the act of communicating, miming and acting, and their apparently disconnected speech is in fact a means to pay attention to each other.
47In the last pages of the novel, when Robert salutes the audience at the end of his play, he and Anna establish bodily communication: ‘He put a hand over his eyes to shield them. She lifted her hand to find his attention. He lifted his hand to wave’ (269). Here, the metonymic function of language is given a polysemic dimension that allows for forms of communication where the signified is redefined as an ability to pay attention to the other, to care, rather than as a specific meaning. The restrictions of speech, therefore, paradoxically provide an emancipation from the restricting boundaries of conventional language and, by engaging the readers’ participation in the reconstruction of meaning, they involve us in a relation of ethical attention to the narrative.